The best quotes from Conrad Black’s ode to his friend Donald Trump

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, an exercise in nationalist populism that has somehow made him more powerful than ever while at the same time earning him explicit comparisons to Hitler, has lost him whatever last bits of media goodwill he still possessed. There is, though, one media personality who still loves Donald. And Donald apparently loves him back:

Black himself can probably never hold high office in his home country, both because he’s a convicted felon and because he showily renounced his Canadian citizenship in 2001. But he can, in the pages of the conservative National Review, help out a friend: Donald Trump, whose wedding Black apparently attended, and whom Black now calls “a fine and generous and loyal man, and a delightful companion.”

Like most of Black’s writing, the National Review piece is a thicket of florid wording and tortured historical connections. As best we can tell, all Black is saying is that Trump probably won’t win the Republican nomination, but that if he does, he’d make a better president than Obama, because Obamacare. And something something national debt.

You really don’t want to read this whole thing, trust us. But here are the best quotes:

“Everyone above the age of 40 has seen an alarming decline in the quality of candidates for high, and especially national, office since the Reagan years.”

(In case there was any doubt as to Black’s favourite U.S. president.)

“[Trump] has the populist aptitudes of the old Progressive party because of his often outlandish Archie Bunker–esque political incorrectness, but he is more credible than Archie…”

(So TV comedy peaked during the Reagan years too, we guess?)

“The liberal media establishment is frenzied in its animosity to Donald Trump, and their hysteria is becoming more vociferous and desperate as he utters clangorous violations of the normal parameters of political discourse.”

(The problem with Donald Trump is that members of the media are a bunch of squares, unlike Conrad Black, who just finished making an All in the Family reference.)

“My view, as persevering readers know, is that it all started to go horribly wrong with Watergate, when one of the most successful administrations in the country’s history was torn apart for no remotely adequate reason and the mendacious assassins in the liberal media have been awarding themselves prizes and commendations for 40 years since.”

(It’s okay to defend Watergate in the National Review because something like 50 per cent of its readership actually worked for Nixon.)